Putting the Damage On
by HotPinkCoffee
Summary: Aboard the Rachel, Tobias and Marco have a conversation on guilt and resilience. One-shot, Tobias' POV. Rated for language. Spoilers for book #54. Title taken from the Tori Amos song.


**Putting the Damage On**

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"Count my mistakes, whatever the cost, I'll go off, I'll make myself scarce. Come tomorrow and you won't find me here. I don't care to stay with the living." -Natalie Merchant, _The Living_

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Frozen baby mice. The big packs you get to feed snakes. Since I couldn't hunt on the _Rachel_, Jake had ensured that we'd brought something my hawk body could digest. Something that felt vaguely familiar. There was no hunt, no satisfaction that comes from outwitting a particularly stubborn rodent, but mouse is mouse, and it tastes like mouse.

I morphed to human to pull a few out of the little fridge we had and microwave them, then demorphed on the counter and started to pick at them.

Marco had apparently also decided to visit the kitchenette. "Nasty, man. Could you at least lay down a paper towel or something?"

Once upon a time I might have made some witty remark back, something about how at least frozen baby mice weren't going to give me a heart attack, or how could I resist the urge to give him salmonella? But I didn't have the energy today. I hadn't had the energy for much conversation in a while, much less verbally sparring with someone I didn't want to be talking to anyway.

Marco kept talking anyway, because he loved the sound of himself talking. "Yeah, well, when you're done chomping on baby Mickey, we're gonna watch a movie. It's a comedy. I know you'd hate to break that sulking spell, but it might actually be, you know, fun for you."

((Doubt it.)) I said dismissively.

"God, Tobias, cheer up for once. We're gonna watch Blazing Saddles for the forty-second time. You're the only guy I know who doesn't even giggle at a Mel Brooks movie."

((Yeah, well, it's not so easy for some of us.)) I said quietly, mostly to myself. It irritated me that Marco could be so casual about this whole thing. What had started at the beginning of the war as some much-needed levity looked to me like denial by the end. And now it was just grating. Hard to giggle at movies when the person you love is dead and the only other person you like very well could be.

"Yeah, well, I guess some of us just like feeling sorry for ourselves too much." Marco shrugged, reaching in the pantry for another compressed food bar. For some reason, that image of him bent over, food bar in hand, judging me while barely even paying enough attention to me to register my comment, without even bothering to look at me, hit a nerve deep within me. I shouldn't have started what came next, but I did.

((So that's what you think it is? Having legitimate feelings is feeling sorry for myself too much? Would you like to tell me the appropriate amount of sorry to feel for myself? Because I figure at least one of us has to make up for all the sorry you're not feeling when you're running around Hollywood with a bunch of skanks.))

"Hey, hey. They're not skanks. They're more high class. I think the word for that is a harlot, right?" He finished the food bar, tossed the wrapper at the waste-bin, missed. "All I'm saying is that spending years in a tree crying might be a bit excessive."

_Excessive?_ I thought, _Compared to whom? Him? _((At least I'm acknowledging people died. The way you talk about the war, you'd think it was all fun and games. And that wasn't even all these years later, we hadn't even had a chance to bury Rachel before you were cozying up to reporters with the oatmeal story.))

Now he looked a bit ticked. It made me glad. "Oh, right. I'm sorry, I didn't know we had to have a designated moratorium on humor until you'd decided you'd have enough time to mourn. Oh wait, that would mean that we could never do anything but grieve for the rest of our lives."

((It was crass, Marco. You were making jokes at the funeral, for God's sake. At her fucking funeral!)) All the things I'd wanted to tell him, all that burning hatred – no, not hatred, never hatred, _disdain_ – started to come out. And in a way, it felt good to feel rage instead of grief for once.

He slammed the cabinet door. "No, Tobias, you know what's crass? Crass is thinking your sorrow is so fucking important that you'll never communicate with the people who gave a damn about you again. Crass is leaving behind a mom who wanted to get to know you."

((She didn't re-)) I tried to interrupt, but Marco was on a roll and wasn't about stop at any point soon.

"You know that your mom asked for you, right? You know that we worried about you? You know that Jake blames himself for you leaving? You know that Naomi wanted to talk to you, because you'd be the best person to tell her about what really happened to her daughter for three years? But I guess none of that matters because the whole world has to revolve around you and your sadness."

I felt like I'd been kicked. Not like I had been at school by bullies. Not like the punch-in-the-gut pain of battle injuries. Deeper. Deeper because maybe it was true. But somehow, it just made me rage more, and so I took the shot. ((At least when I feel sorry for myself I don't try to kill people. I go hang out in my tree. I don't try to push them off cliffs when I can't take it anymore.))

He turned pale. His fists clenched. For an instant, I thought he'd attack me. I thought maybe Marco wasn't the composed playboy he'd been presenting and that just beneath the surface, there was a deep well of anger he was going to take out on me. Instinctively I sized up the situation – I'd be helpless. A hawk in the air is one thing, but in a small room against an adult human, he could have broken every bone in my body.

But he didn't. Instead he breathed deep, closed his eyes and kicked the fridge. "Don't you ever say that again. Don't you ever, ever, _ever_ suggest that I tried to kill Visser One for any reason other than the cause."

I knew it was a lie. I'd been there, after all. I'd recognized it in him because I'd seen the same thing in myself. The desperation, the belief that one final act could free us from the hell that was the present – was trying to fling my bird body into a skylight all that different from trying to push my mother off a cliff?

But it was, because killing myself would have only hurt me, right? I wouldn't have put an innocent human host in the way. And as someone who never had had any family, I could understand the desperation but not the intent to kill someone who loved me.

Marco continued. "You know what I did for my mom for mother's day? I bought her rock-climbing lessons. We laughed about it. I guess we could be like you and cry about how awful it was, but my family doesn't exactly roll like that."

((Yeah, well, you have one.)) I said.

"Yeah. I do." He said, then looked at me almost sadly. "Maybe that's what made it so easy to move on. I turned out okay. I started without my mom and I got her back. I got my dad back. Can't really say the same for you."

((Maybe you were just always better at it.)) It was true, I'd never been good at coping with anything. My survival strategy didn't go far beyond "endure". I never made it to "thrive".

He jumped up to sit on the counter with me. The sudden movement spooked me, and the hawk instinct kicked in, flaring my wings. He scooted a few inches away and I calmed down. "That too. I just don't get it. Being lonely isn't going to bring Rachel back. Pretending nobody cares that you're gone doesn't make it true."

((Telling yourself the war was "the good ol' days" doesn't make that true either.)) I stared at the remaining frozen mouse, no longer hungry.

"But it makes me a hell of a lot more easy to be around. I don't think you even want to move on. It's like you're miserable so you can make us all feel guilty for not being completely dysfunctional."

That took me surprise. ((Is that why you think I went into hiding?))

Marco shrugged.

((Is that why you hate me now?))

Another shrug. He bit his lip. "I don't hate you. But you really know how to get under someone's skin without opening your mouth – er, beak. Hard to enjoy my thousands of hot babes and million-dollar movie deals when I know you're out there cutting yourself in the woods somewhere. Or whatever hawks do to punish themselves."

((We hunt skunks.)) I said. If I were a human I may have smirked at him, but I wasn't.

He actually laughed. "Tobias my man, that might have been the first joke you've told in four years."

((Probably was.)) I morphed human. The familiar grinding of bones, the sudden increase in mass, the feathers giving way to skin. I'd started morphing again on this trip, but I hadn't for all those years in hiding. I was slower at it. It made the process even more ungainly than it always was. I started cleaning up the counter.

"I could have done that for you." Marco said, opening yet another bar of food.

"I'd have had to ask."

"Nah, I'm pretty sure if you left a pile of stinking mouse guts on the counter, I'd have cleaned it up at some point." He turned to leave. I started to demorph. As he walked out, he turned around and said, "Anyway, you should come watch the stupid movie. Now that we're recovering your long-lost sense of humor maybe you'll actually get something out of it."

He left. I stayed on the counter for a few minutes, then fluttered to the little table we'd all set up. The ship had a window there, though all it looked out at was white Z-space.

Was it true? Had Loren asked for me? Had I been blinded by my own grief? And yet, it was so hard to think of Rachel without feeling like the will to live had been ripped out of me. Hard to think, after how much she'd loved me, that anyone else could ever come close in any way. Hard to think that her death was a wound that could ever heal. Hard to not feel like it was a betrayal to even want to.

And yet…

I decided I might as well go watch the movie. It was partway through by the time I got there, but it wasn't a hard storyline to follow. And God help me, if I'd had a mouth, I might have smiled.


End file.
